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writing writing advice

Dealing With a Bunch of Fucking Nerds: Research and “Getting It Right”

I’ve gotten some interesting blowback since I decided to go public with my irritation over JRR Tolkien’s puzzling geomorphology. Among the “well actually” and personal insults, there’ve been a more interesting complaint, with variations. To paraphrase: “Writers shouldn’t have to be an experts on everything just to tell a story!”

Well, yes and no.

To be fair to my geological whinging (and that of many other nitpickers across a multitude of different fields), you don’t actually have to be an expert at anything to get most of this stuff right. The geology is level 101 stuff you would cover in the Freshman classes fondly called “Rocks for Jocks” at my old university. The amount of research you have to do to get particular details that are ancillary to your story correct is probably very small. Take a half hour out of your day to do some googling. Ask a friend who is knowledgeable in that area. Read a single book about it, and you’ll likely be covered.

Actually knowing that you lack the knowledge or what you’ve absorbed from other novels and TV is incorrect so that you’d better start asking questions is the much more difficult part. Because you have realized by now, right, that art and reality often diverge?

I think the much more important question here is: do you care if you get it right?

I’m going to add an extremely important caveat: There are certain topics, particularly when it comes to the lives and histories of marginalized groups, where you can and will hurt people by not doing your research. For example: books that promulgate racist tropes or racist historical narratives. Now, maybe you don’t care if you hurt people, in which case I think you’re an awful person and you probably don’t care about that either. But for the most part, we can apply the principle of “First, do no harm” here.

But the course of your river making no goddamn sense in a world where water works the same way it does on Earth? This harms precisely no one. It might irritate people who have a basic understanding of geomorphology, but irritation is not the same thing as being harmed. The decision you’re really facing as a writer is if you can handle people complaining about it, and at absolute worst not buying your next book if it pisses them off that bad. (In which case they were probably looking for hyper-realistic world-building-porn fantasy and wouldn’t really be your target audience anyway.)

Part of this is a question of audience expectation. What expectation are you setting up for them? There’s been a lot of fantasy written that projects a veneer of realism (eg: Game of Thrones, and frankly Lord of the Rings) which means that when the details fail, people with a reason to understand those details take notice. If you want to be “realistic,” you have to do the work or risk someone catching you being lazy and saying now wait a damn minute loudly and in public1. The audience is generally not going to approach something that purports to be realistic with the same expectations they will approach something that says on the package it takes place in a bananapants land where rocks float and rivers run backwards due to the population of magic-farting unicorns.

Even if you clearly project that this is bananapants-land, you’re still going to get complainers, though. This is because you’re working in a genre full of fucking nerds. And you know what nerds do? They pick apart things they hate using the lens of their specialized knowledge, and they pick apart things they love even more. And then they talk about it, incessantly.

Only this isn’t a thing limited to nerds in the classic genre sense. Firefighters shred movies like Backdraft and enjoy it in all its awful glory.  If you write a sportsball book and you get the sportsball details wrong, I’m pretty sure the people who like sportsball will eat you alive. This is a human thing. When you have knowledge, you notice when something is wrong, and then you tell other people about it.

So wait, am I saying you do have to be an expert in everything? No, I’m saying you have to be okay with experts reading what you wrote and possibly finding it wanting.

When I was doing my screenwriting coursework, there were two things I heard in every class, without fail:

  1. Give yourself permission to suck.
  2. Never let the facts get in the way of the truth.

Rule number two here means that if reality gets in the way of the story you’re constructing, the story wins. Screw reality. This is probably the reason why pretty much every movie ever made causes experts to tear out their hair.

I don’t think this should be considered blanket permission to just make everything up and not even try. There are a multitude of books and movies that are terribly researched, and the fact of the matter is, if they’d actually given reality a chance their conflicts and twists would have been a hell of a lot more interesting and challenging for the characters. But you’re writing a story, not a textbook. So write your story. Just realize that this is not a get out of jail free card from ever being criticized about anything.

(Though I will say, if this criticism of your work is dropped steaming into your inbox or tagged at you on social media, that is rude as fuck on the part of the angry nerd. If you choose to read it, that’s your problem.)

Ultimately, you have to decide what you want to get right, and what you’re fine with getting yelled at about. I’m sure all of the physics stuff in what I write is terrible, because I prefer handwavium-fueled rule of cool physics to real physics. Thus, I do not give even half a shit if someone complains that my physics suck, because I was never trying to get them correct in the first place. The people who complain are still allowed to complain, and I’m allowed to ignore them. It’s a feature, not a bug.

And even for the stuff you want to get right, I have some bad news: you’re probably not going to nail down every detail perfectly. Worlds are complex things, and there will always be nitpickers who know more about something than you. It is impossible to write a book that is universally loved and never criticized for anything, and worrying over it will induce a sort of creative paralysis that will make writer’s block look like a fun day at a water park. The fact that you are a writer means that someone, somewhere, is going to hate the thing you wrote—or love it but wish you had just gotten the right breed of horse in that one scene—and they are going to take to the internet and talk about it.

Embrace it.

1 – As an aside, actually having a basis in reality versus being perceived as realistic are often two incredibly different things, and when you’ve got an audience that lacks expert knowledge it’s another wrinkle in the expectation game. That’s why, and I will use hilariously here to mean that I’m going to laugh so I don’t scream, there are sectors of readers who think ubiquitous sexual assault in medieval-Europe-flavored fantasy is “realistic” and the presence of non-white people in such a setting is “unrealistic.” Where actual realism flies in the face of the pop culture zeitgeist of “realism,” I encourage you strongly to challenge your readers because it’s good for them. Just be ready with your research notes.

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writing advice

Write Every Day

And lo, there is another writer on a fairly well-trafficked site who has chosen to pull down their trousers and show the internet their ass in an effort to give new writers a complex about if they’re doing it “right.” Because if you don’t write every day, you’re not a real writer, apparently.

Well, as someone who is a real writer by this arbitrary standard of egoist nonsense, I say bullshit.

There’s a lot of discussion about why this advice isn’t feasible for a lot of people, which includes points about working, mental health, energy, disability, etc. There’s also the very valid reason that it just doesn’t work for me. And that’s also okay.

I think in the past, I might have handed this shitgem out myself. And for that, I am deeply sorry. I’ve grown up a lot since then and made friends with a lot of other writers, which has taught me the much more useful fact that there is no one correct way to do this. There’s only the way that you figure out how to best squeeze your brain for word juice, and then dribble the word juice on the page in the right squiggles to make it a story that you feel sufficiently okay for having written.

I know I used to hand that out as gospel because that’s how it was handed down to me, and it’s something that’s actually worked for me. And when you’re a newbie trying desperately to pretend you’re a Real Writer(TM) (because you haven’t realized that you are already a Real Writer and there is no Pope of Writing who canonizes you) you want to pretend like you know what you’re doing–or worse, you assume that you do know what you’re doing, and you’ve found the mystical Right Way, and that will show you’ve got it all figured out. And you may have figured it out for yourself, but lack the self awareness to realize that this is only for yourself.

There isn’t a One True Way of writing. It would be a lot easier to be a writer if there was, and you could just learn it from listening to other writers pontificate. But the fact of the matter is, the only One True Way is whatever works for you to get words from your brain meat onto the page, and you’re going to spend a lot of time figuring that out. It takes a lot of try/fail cycles to build a unique process. And the process will probably evolve over time as you evolve as a person and as a writer, and as your life and circumstances change. I know from many a pantser versus plotter discussion that the line between the two is actually a very thin, permeable membrane. Because people will do what works for them at the time.

Writing advice is best when offered as “this works for me” so it can be taken with a sufficient grain of salt. And it’s not at all bad to ask other people about how they write. It’s a way to get ideas on how to work that you can try for yourself, and you might end up with a new gear to slot into your writing machine that will make things run more smoothly. Or you find your writing machine now makes a horrible grinding noise and just shits out rotten world salad, and you better take that gear back out and toss it.

So I mentioned that I’m someone who writes every day. It is a thing that has worked for me. And I want to explain the what and why, in case there’s anything useful to be taken from it.

The reason I write every day is out of fear. I went a really long time in my early twenties when I stopped writing entirely. And when I got started again, it was in fits and starts and had long gaps. And it wasn’t because I didn’t have the ideas, but because it was easy to have other things to do. I had a lot of mental inertia working against me. I started writing again in earnest because of NaNoWriMo (which isn’t the greatest how-to model, but if you can gain useful ideas from it, then it’s worth it) and I learned that I could write long things again if I just fucking wrote them and didn’t stop. If I got inertia working in the other direction, got myself in motion, and stayed in motion.

So that’s why I write every day. It’s not work ethic, it’s fear. I’m absolutely terrified that if I stop, I won’t get started again. If you do not have this problem, I am very glad for you.

The other thing about writing every day is that it’s all in how you define the writing. And it’s not cheating, thank you, because this isn’t a contest and you make your own rules for this mental game you play against yourself. I don’t write new words on a rough draft every day. Sometimes I write non-fiction stuff I owe. Sometimes I just write blog posts about shit I want to write about, like movies. Sometimes I edit. Sometimes, drunk on alcohol or lack of sleep, I put down 300 words of utter, random shit that I will delete in the morning, and then crawl off to bed.

At least for me, writing every day isn’t some kind of holy charge, it’s a bunch of smoke and mirrors I employ to trick myself into writing.

If you can pull anything useful out of that, great. If not, also great. Do what works for you, and don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not a Real Writer. All they’re proving is that they’re a Real Asshole.

Categories
writing advice

Submitting short stories: the waiting period

The excellent John D asked on a previous writing nuts and bolts post:

On a related note, how soon is too soon to submit another story to a magazine after a rejection. One of them just rejected a story of mine (but included a nice note, which I do appreciate) and I have another story that I think might fit their guidelines. I don’t want to seem overly pushy or idiotic, so how long should I wait before submitting the new story to them?

And I figure that’s an important enough question that it deserves its own post. For more of the nitty-gritty stuff, see the writing advice category/tag.

The first thing here is everyone’s old favorite, read the submission guidelines. Quite a few markets specify in the guidelines if there’s a cooling-off period before you can submit again. For example, F&SF has a 15-day waiting period, which is only in effect if they answer your submission in less than 15 days. Lightspeed wants you to wait 7 days. So does Clarkesworld. And I’m sure there are more, those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. But you don’t have to remember which ones off the top of your head, because the submission guidelines will tell you.

If there isn’t a specified waiting period between submissions, then that’s it. You can submit something again the second after you receive your rejection for the previous story. And I’d encourage you to do so, if you have something you think fits the market.

I know it does feel a bit pushy to be like, “Hey I know you just rejected my last story, but how do you like me now?” But this isn’t personal. You’re trying to sell a story to an editor, not date them. Especially if an editor takes the time to tell you that they liked what you sent and want to see more, send them more. Don’t wait.

Personal anecdote time: when I was querying my agent, the inimitable DongWon Song, he sent me an extremely nice “no thanks” on the first novel I sent him. I took about thirty seconds to run in circles and think oh god I’m going to sound like a pushy, desperate jerk and then I screwed my courage to the sticking point and asked him: “okay, but would you maybe be interested in this other novel I have stashed in my back pocket?” And I’m glad every day that past me had the guts to do that, because now that’s the thrilling conclusion to my “how I got an agent” story.

Editors, while I think they try as a matter of course to not destroy anyone’s soul, are not there to blow sunshine up your ass. If they say they want to see more, they’re not just saying that to make you feel better. Every personal note I sent with a rejection to tell someone that I wanted to see more from them if I did another anthology was from the heart.

And honestly? Even if you didn’t get a personal note or a “please send more” rejection, send more if what you have is polished and appropriate. The story that got rejected didn’t work out, but the next one might. You don’t know until you send it, and each story is a new chance. There’s no need to wait, and it’s definitely not being pushy.

 

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writing writing advice

Have you cold bullshit cake and eat it too.

Recently, my buddy Paul mentioned the science fiction short story I love to hate, The Cold Equations.


To be honest, if you want a description of why I find the story morally reprehensible, just go read what Cory Doctorow wrote about it over two years ago and imagine me pointing to every word and screaming, “YES, THIS.” But one thing I do want to talk about is that I think it’s also, frankly, shitty writing craft.

Let me take a moment to raise the drawbridge, I can sense the mob lighting its torches. There we go.

I don’t know if I’ve ever made my disdain of Chosen One/Prophecy/Do X Or The World Blows Up stories clear on this blog, but there it is. I really don’t like stories that are predicated upon removing one of the major choices of its protagonist. Particularly the last – no one short of a sociopath would realistically, upon being told that the world will literally end if they don’t carry the Magic Arglebargle to the Forbidden Closet of Trumblebutt, would say nah, I think I’m good. The understandable period of denial on that one is really just playing coy with the inevitable.

Stories like The Cold Equations are that kind of agency removal on steroids, except at the end you feel like no matter how many showers you take, you will never be clean again. The entire point of the story is the removing all character agency so they are left with one shitty, reprehensible choice. They make the choice, story ends, everyone feels so bad for the poor character and the way they were railroaded by fate in the form of very particular authorial (or in the case of TCE, editorial) choices. Stories that spend a significant amount of words building baroque and frankly unbelievable systems just to force a perfectly good character into a corner aren’t so much stories as torture devices.

They’re also damn boring in my opinion, but that’s because I’m a big fan of character-driven stories. I don’t really want to see someone get moved to and fro by the winds of fate while they feel bad about the situation and do absolutely nothing.

That these stories are often hailed as being somehow realistic is even more problematic. In real life, the number of times someone is backed into a corner where they literally have only one possible choice are vanishingly small. Often times, all of the choices are varying shades of bad, but they are still there. You may feel like you have no choice, but that is not the same as objectively having no choices like occurs in The Cold Equations.

This is not to be confused with a character making a reprehensible choice and then justifying it to themselves with the mantra of “I had no other choice.” That is an intensely realistic reaction. People build their own internal narratives so that they are the hero, or they go mad.

Rather, stories like The Cold Equations are an intrusion of the author into the moral universe of the audience, an attempt to force the character’s internal narrative of “I had no other choice” onto us. They quite literally had no choice, don’t you see? You must remain on their side, dear reader. It’s a cheap way to allow a character to do something utterly terrible and still keep the audience on board. To sympathize with them. Because really, if we were put in the same ridiculous, artificial situation, we’d have to do the same, right?

Recently at a writing workshop, a friend of mine was taking critique on a chapter of his novel. (This story is being told with his permission, by the way.) He had a situation where his main character needed to pretend to have done something terrible to an innocent woman. All right. But then he asked if we, as readers, would still like the character if he roughed the woman up a little to give his charade verisimilitude. Okay, but what if he really, really felt bad about it? What if he had no other choice?

That was the point where I interjected with this question: “Why are you trying to make it okay for your character to beat up a woman?”

Later when we talked a bit more about it, he mentioned that he wanted to be unflinching in his writing. Which strikes me as something a lot of people strive toward. I have opinions about “gritty” fiction that don’t need to be expounded upon here. But my question is why, if you want to be unflinching about the badness of the situation your character is in, do you then flinch away from the negative reaction your audience may have to their choice?

When I was a baby writer, I found writing plots that forced the characters into corners so they had to make the choices I wanted, often in the pursuit of being “gritty” and “edgy.” I have since course corrected, and all of those stories have been mercifully exiled into the Trunk of Awfulness, never to see the light of day. But as I look over those early efforts, I can’t help but feel more than a little creeped out. Because in real life, I can tell you who most often uses the “I had no choice,” narrative to justify the unjustifiable.

I didn’t want to, but you made me hit you. Why would I want to build worlds in which there is no choice but the most immoral? Why would I want to convince readers that it’s a something to sympathize with? It’s something that just couldn’t be helped, because that’s the way the world is?

These are not absolutes, of course. Nothing in art is. Nothing in life is. But the next time you find yourself engineering a situation where your character has no choice, ask yourself why. Ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish. And be unflinching in your answer.

Categories
writing advice

Here, let me write your cover letter for you

I would like to make Elise’s job, and that of all editors less painful. I’ve mentioned this before, but the cover letter was the number one source of angst for me when I was first starting out submitting short stories, probably because the only other time I’d encountered cover letters was for job applications. Trust me, they are not the same thing in the publishing world. This is not a query letter. The cover letter is basically just the tag you put on your submission so you’re not flinging a random file into someone’s inbox. A lot of markets don’t even require them.

So let me write your cover letter for you. This is quite literally the cover letter that has accompanied almost every story I’ve sold.

Thank you for considering my story, “[TITLE OF THE MOST MIND-BLOWING SHORT STORY EVER].” It’s about [WORDCOUNT] words long. I’m a [MEMBERSHIP LEVEL OF RELEVANT PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATION], and have published:

[MOST RECENTLY PUBLISHED STORY]

[SECOND MOST RECENTLY PUBLISHED STORY]

[THIRD MOST RECENTLY PUBLISHED STORY]

Thank you again and I hope that you enjoy reading my story!

[YOUR NAME]

Feel free to cut and paste. You’re welcome.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Read the submissions guidelines, o writerlings. You should be tattooing them on your eyeballs anyway. But if the great and terrible editors want something that isn’t in my form letter, they will specify it there and you’d best give it to them.

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ask the dapper sir writing advice

[Ask the Dapper Sir] Is it okay to share my stories online?

Say I have a couple of short stories ready. Is it best not to share it on a personal writing blog until it’s published, if ever, or does it not matter?

It actually matters a lot.

There are basically two categories of submissions for magazines: originals and reprints.

An original is a story that has never been published anywhere ever. Even the tiniest of audiences count for this. If you published it in your school newspaper/literary magazine, it is considered to be published and thus selling it as an original is no longer an option. If you put your story up on a blog or forum where it can potentially be viewed by the general public (as opposed to a forum where it’s viewable only to members, and membership is controlled and regulated) then for all intents and purposes you have self-published the story and you can likewise not sell it as an original. Rule of thumb is, if the story is available in a way that could be conceivably considered public, it’s been published. (Some markets may make exceptions to this, but if so it will be in their guidelines. Remember how I said to always read the guidelines? Read the guidelines.)

reprint is a story that has been previously published elsewhere. Some markets may take reprints. Many do not. Reprints always pay significantly less than originals. (eg: if you get $0.07/word on an original, you will probably just get $0.01 or $0.02 for a reprint if you’re lucky.)

So basically, if you share your story on your personal writing blog, unless that blog is only accessible to a very restricted set of your friends, you have self-published it. Which means you can only submit your story as a reprint to whatever markets will consider reprints. (Don’t even think about trying to lie to editors and pretend you never published the story. Editors are very good at the Google, and most have earned the Way Back Machine merit badge as well.)

Generally, even if your blog is friends-only, I tend to recommend to not publish it there because mistakes can happen, security settings can be randomly changed (hi, Facebook) and you could end up shooting yourself in the foot by accident. I’d say if you want to share a piece with your beta readers, use a private forum, or e-mail, or maybe an invite only file sharing service like Google Docs.

What about after your story has been bought and published?

Most contracts will contain some sort of exclusivity clause. For example, this is from the guidelines for Strange Horizons

We buy first-printing world exclusive English-language rights (including audio rights) for two months. After that period, you are free to republish the story elsewhere. We hope that you’ll allow us to leave the story in our archives indefinitely after it’s rotated off the main table of contents, but you have the right to remove your story from the archives at any time after those first two months.

First printing world English-language rights basically means the story needs to have not been published anywhere in print in English, because otherwise you no longer have those rights to offer. Strange Horizons also asks for audio rights because they do story podcasts, so your story needs to have not been published in an audio format before either. “World” means anywhere in the world; they want the story to have not been published in English anywhere in the world, and your story published by them will be available world-wide. This is standard for internet-based magazines, since… you know, world-wide web. For print publications, you’re more likely to see a more specific ask, such as “North American English-language rights.”

The exclusive… for two months means that the story is theirs and theirs alone for that time period. After two months elapse you can try to sell reprint rights to other markets or publish it in some other fashion (eg: putting it up as a self-published ebook). So you also cannot put your story on your personal blog until after their period of exclusivity has elapsed or you will be in breach of the contract. While I doubt anyone is going to sue you over a story that earned at most $720, the damage that could do to your reputation would be far, far worse. Also, please note that the period of requested exclusivity will vary from market to market. Always read your contracts and keep a copy on hand.

Now, Strange Horizons also does a cool thing you’ll note in their guidelines where at the author’s request, they will take the story out of their archive after two months. This is actually very unusual; most online publications reserve the right to keep an archived copy for as long as they please. What this means is that, say, if there’s a market that will take reprints but not if they’re freely available online, you can ask Strange Horizons to get rid of the archived copy. But the thing to consider here is that your story on your personal blog, post-publication, is also a readily available online copy. The more widely available a story is to anyone with a search engine, the less attractive it might seem to certain reprint markets. It’s just another thing to consider.

Other questions? Anything I missed?

Categories
trip report writing advice

I’m in London! And current rejection stats.

The two are not related.

Just I’ve been talking to a few writers who are even newer to this than me and I wanted to give some perspective on the short story submission thing. I’ve now had 20 sales, not counting reprints. Out of 20 short story sales:

  • Average number of rejections per sale: 6.85
  • Fewest rejections before publication: 0
  • Most rejections before publication: 20

Keep in mind that my sales range from pro to semi-pro to one that was token payment. I don’t submit stories to non-paying markets, period. I also have 9 stories that I’ve trunked without selling, because I stopped believing in them.

The three stories I consider to be the best I’ve written thus far—Comes the HuntsmanThe Heart-Beat Escapement, and They Tell Me There Will Be No Pain—received 3, 7, and 4 rejections respectively before being published.

So basically, just keep bouncing your stories back out into the slush pile until you’ve either run out of markets (in which case you wait for a new one such as an antho to open) or run out of belief in your vision and/or your execution of that vision in writing.

And yes, I am in London right now. I’m enjoying my vacation already in my most splendidly failtastic style, which is to say I do a lot of sleeping and taking my sweet time at the gym and working at the non-geology jobs and typing on the computer while I listen to the ambient sound of a foreign city. That’s how I roll. The flight was good (I got a whole row to myself), the getting to the rental flat was a comedy of errors, and I can’t figure out how to make one of the showers work because I think its controls were put together as a joke. (The Canadian couldn’t figure it out either so you don’t get to blame this on me being a stupid American. Blame the stupid inscrutable British plumbing.)

You know, normal life in the UK when I’m here. Planning to live on a diet of toast, nutella, and bananas for the next week. Generally pleased with everything, looking forward to hanging out with friends. The pay as you go gym is unfortunately further away than I wanted thanks to us being moved to a different flat, but the space is nice. All of the guys in the strength training room very carefully Did Not Notice My Existence, which is how I prefer it. Except for one guy who made an abortive lunge for the bar when I was doing my final rep in a set of 105lb bench presses, so I had to assure him that I totally had it. At which point he started carefully ignoring me as well, but with occasional sidelong glances just to let me know I was worrying him. I try to take these things as adorable, well-meaning helper fails as opposed to anything more frustrating. (But really, people, don’t lunge at the bar unless someone actually asks for help, it’s kind of distracting.)

Looking forward to a relaxing week before Worldcon!

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Uncategorized writing writing advice

How much are you worth?

The question is more literally “How much is your writing worth?” but since art is in effect a piece of you that you have offered for the consumption of others, I think it’s a fair question.

In the last day, there’s been a minor blow-up about Random House’s new Hydra imprint. Simply put, the contract is horrifically awful. Cory Doctorow pointed out you’d be better off self-publishing through a site like Lulu.com. Scalzi said the contract would make any good agent’s head explode, and later dissected a contract from the sister imprint Alibi. Random House has now written the SFWA a letter about this matter, and the SFWA has responded quite negatively. If you are someone who hopes to some day publish a novel, you should read these posts. You need to educate yourself about this, because there are people out there (apparently including in big publishing houses who should know better) who want to exploit your work.

And if you’re a reader of fiction, you should pay attention to. Practices that hurt writers will ultimately hurt readers, in a myriad of ways. We depend on each other.

What really pisses me off about this entire thing is that it blatantly targets new, struggling writers. Because we’re desperate, and we may not understand how precious our rights are, and which rights we should expect to retain as a matter of course. As a new, struggling writer, I know how tempting it can be to grab at any offer that will get your book in print somehow, because then you get to feel like a real writer. Trying to get published sucks. It involves constant rejection. It involves waiting for immense periods of time just so someone can tell you no over and over again. It’s fucking depressing. And I know that the opportunity to escape that cycle of rejection can feel like someone’s thrown you a rope when you’re drowning.

Only sometimes, the rope is the tail of a poisonous snake. Or a hydra. (See what I did there?)

You ultimately have to ask yourself what is my work worth? Ask yourself what am I worth?

I can tell you right now, your work is worth more than giving up all of your rights and paying for the privilege of seeing your name on the cover of an ebook. You and your work are worth enough that you should not be paying production costs. You and your work are worth enough that you should not have every single right stripped from you for the full term of copyright. You’re worth way more than that. And your friends who are writers are worth more than that too. So tell them to avoid these imprints. Tell them it’s a bad deal. Tell them that in publishing, money should never come from the author, and we have to fight to keep it that way.

You are worth putting up with the rejection until you get a good yes. I know how it is, man. I’d do just about anything to get one of my novels in print. But I wouldn’t do this, because my work is mine, it’s me, and I’m a financial gravity well toward which money flows.

 

See also:

Categories
writing advice

NaNo-advice

By which I mean advice for NaNoWriMo, not advice x 10^-9.

I’ve done NaNo five times, personally, and “won” it all five times, which is to say I’ve managed to produce 50k words in a month. Of those five times, twice I’ve gotten completed novels. Of those two novels, I’ve deemed one good enough that I’ve been willing to plunge into query letter Hell for it.

NaNo is a good experience if you want to practice writing, and writing at length. As was said at the How to Get Your Work Rejected Worldcon panel, a lot of people want to have written a novel. Most of them don’t want to actually write one. Because writing one, particularly the first time you do it, can be kind of hard.

So from me to you, a little advice:

Find what works for you. Everyone ultimately has a different writing process, and what works for me is not necessarily going to work for you. I know some people who find NaNo meetups and write-ins are incredibly  useful. I’ve never had any luck with them because I can’t concentrate when there are people around. But if they work for you? Great! This means you need to experiment and figure out how to set up conditions so that you can actually get writing done. Which may sound unhelpful at its face – what do you mean, I can’t tell you how to do this? – but this is also permission to ignore advice from other people if it just doesn’t work for you. Experiment!

There is nowhere this is highlighted more than the great Pantsers vs. Outliners debate. Some people can write a novel without an outline. I have no idea how they do this – my first NaNo was a seat of my pants affair, and it was a 50K train wreck by the time I limped to the finish. (I would not recommend padding your wordcount by overdescribing everything, by the way, unless you want to end up hating your story. Or unless you really like waxing poetic about tatami mats.) Of course, on the other end of the spectrum you have Kevin J. Anderson and his terrifying novella-length outlines. (Not making this up.) Personally, I like writing about a page of bullet points, which I then don’t actually hold the story to. Which means that I will sometimes redraft an outline four or five times as things develop and then ending looks like it’ll be somewhere else.

Figure out what works for you. If you get lost easily and can’t figure out where you’re going, outline. If knowing how the story will end means you’re bored with it before you start, don’t. And don’t let anyone tell you that you’re doing it wrong so long as it works for you.

That said, here are four more pieces of advice that I think are universally useful.

Don’t look back. When you’re doing this thing for the first time, you should feel like you’re throwing yourself down a mountain, and the only way to keep from dying is to just keep running as fast as you can or risk losing your footing. Trust me. If you go back and let yourself edit particularly, you’ve lost the battle already. You’re distracted from getting words on the page. Just keep writing. And if you realize that you need to change something you already wrote, just write yourself a big note in the middle of your page and keep going. Edit later. Write now.

By the way, you also don’t have to write in chronological order.

Unplug the internet. The internet not-so-secretly wants to keep you from getting anything done. Trust me. When you are writing, you should be writing and that means not checking your e-mail. Turn off wifi on your laptop, put your droid or iPhone on silent, and let the world go for a couple of hours. It’ll be fine without you.

Write the interesting parts. If you are struggling to write because you’re bored by what you’re writing, skip it and go write something interesting. Come back to it later, and maybe you won’t find that part so boring. (Or, if it is boring, you should probably ask yourself if it’s necessary, and if so, how can you make it not boring. Because if you’re bored writing it, a reader is probably not going to find it more interesting than you did.)

Write every day. It’s a point for debate if you should worry about word goals strictly. I met some people at the Mile Hi Con NaNo panel that had success with binge writing. Well, more power to them. But writing every day is still non-negotiable. Even if it’s just ten minutes on your lunch break where you add two lines of dialog, that’s good enough. The point is that you need to make this a habit. You need to feel like something is deeply wrong with the world if you haven’t sat down and put some words on the page today. And once you skip one day, it’s easier to skip another, and then next thing you know it’s December and your characters are still sitting in a tavern and trying to decide if they actually want to bother saving the world or not.

Happy NaNo-ing, guys! I’m looking forward to rejoining the ranks next year, once the specter of grad school has released me from its icy clutches. Good writing, and remember – don’t look back! There are zombies!

(Oh yeah, and happy Halloween, too!)

Categories
worldcon writing advice

[Worldcon] How to Get Your Work Rejected

Sunday (September 2) at 1630: How to Get Your Work Rejected
Panelists listed in program: John Berlyne, Lee Harris, John Helfers, Susan MacDonald

Disclaimer: These are my notes from the panel and my own, later thoughts. I often was unable to attend the entire panel, and also chronically missed panelist introductions. When possible I try to note who said something, but often was unable to. Also, unless something is in double quotes it should be considered a summary and not a direct quotation.

1) Recognize that you’re a genius and the ordinary rules don’t apply to you.
You can’t break the rules until you know what they are.
And this isn’t just about the rules of writing. You should also ignore the guidelines put down for submission by the publisher! That’ll make it stand out, right?
Using google to track down the editor of the publishing house and then sending your MS to their home address totally isn’t creepy at all.
[Saving the Pearls joke by Lee Harris. A grand total of two of us in the room get it. OH MY GOD DON’T YOU PEOPLE READ THE INTERNET?]
Sometimes a little humility is not a bad thing.
Confidence is good, arrogance is not.

2) Talk a LOT about your project (tell everyone you know what you plan to eventually write about). 
Lee hates the aspiring writer label. You either write or you don’t. If you’re writing, you’re a writing. If you’re not writing, you aren’t.
“Aspiring brain surgeon” XD
A lot of people want to have written a novel. They don’t want to actually write a novel.
Lee: It doesn’t matter to an extent how bad your book is. If you sat down and do the work, fucking good on you because you have done something most people can’t do.
Writers deserve to be congratulated for finishing something. Then you get into the problems.
John does not like getting talked AT or people who just endlessly go on and on about their work.
You can’t be a writer unless you write. It’s about work ethic as much as anything.
The worst excuse you can give yourself is that you don’t have the time. You do have the time. The excuse actually means you don’t want to write. Set your alarm 15 minutes earlier, and write one page (250 words) then in 100 days you have a novella. In a year you have a novel.

3) Stay in your comfort zone. Classes are a waste of time for someone of YOUR talent.
Susan: “Writing in a way that seemed natural to me was very easy. Then I took courses and the teachers made me do exercises that left me feeling so uncomfortable that I went home and cried. But I forced myself to do it and it changed my ability to write. If you move into a field that you’re not very good at it stretches your abilities as a writer.”
Join a writing a group. Classes aren’t the be all and end all. You have to make sure you’re challenged. Try new things.
Read outside your comfort zone too.
Just have your mum and your friends read through it and mention what they say in your cover letter.
Often having attended a real workshop (particularly if you paid to do so like with Clarion) will catch attention because it shows you have invested in your work.

4) Workshop your piece until it’s perfect. Don’t write anything else. 
Continual revision based on the opinion of others.
When is it actually finished? No piece of work is ever 100% finished. You will never be completely finished. You just have to get it to the point that it’s good enough and then send it in. If you try to make it perfect, you are wasting your time, which could be better used to write something else.
Do nothing but revise! Make sure that first half chapter is utterly perfect!
You can actually over-polish something until it’s been ground away to nothing.
Don’t follow up to a submission immediately with a revision to the publisher. It just will not work.
On the other hand, you just can’t send in the first draft. Finish the novel, put it in a drawer, and let it percolate/ferment/fester for a while.

5) Get only your mom’s opinion. 
Only get opinions from people you know will love it! You just need what you already know confirmed.
Exception: your mom is a NY times bestselling author or a managing editor.
Get opinions from people who will be good at giving you the truth.

6) Send your manuscript everywhere and to everyone!
Approach every possible agent you can find a contact address for regardless of their interest in genre. And make sure to cc one e-mail to all of the agents at once and start it with “Dear Agent/Sir/Madam.”
Google Jinny Good and he has tried to schlep his novel to every agent in existence and has posted all their rejections with their contact info. A lovely display of demented vitriol. Not so much shotgun as howitzer.
Having a website where you loudly shit on everyone who has ever rejected your work, you will be guaranteed to continue being rejected!
Counter: research with the internet.
Lee: we’re not looking for reasons to reject you. We’re looking for reasons to publish you. Relationships between authors, agents, and editors need to be long-term relationships built on trust.

7) Ensure your submission really stands out (sticky notes to point out the best parts)!
Submitting a manuscript is like applying for a job. We’re looking for professionals we can take seriously.
Your query letter is the first example of your writing that you read.
When you do get published, you might get sent to do publicity. Publishers are expecting you to represent the company well. “You wrote a good story but we also felt you wouldn’t embarrass us.” Bathing is good (not while you’re at the interview)
Lie in your query letter. (We have the internet too. We will find out. And we don’t want to work with you if we can’t trust you.)
This is a small community and agents and editors talk to each other. They’re not just in competition. They talk about who they all do not want to work with.

8) Include a bribe with your submission
Someone sent a bird skull with their MS.
A guy dressed as a barbarian went to the Tor offices and asked if his MS had been read yet.

9) Write and tell the editors who are too stupid to accept your MS just how stupid they are.
AKA don’t shit on your own doorstep.
Acceptance is not a negotiation. No one ever got published by harassing an agent.
There are several authors who have acted themselves out of very promising careers. Don’t be a hot potato that no one wants to touch because you’re crazy.
When you are rejected, don’t react personally. It’s business.
No matter how painful it is (and it is painful) the fact is you have to develop a very thick skin. It’s a very small field; if you trash talk it will get back to the person your trash talking.
A rejection letter says, “This isn’t quite right for us please send more” you should be elated. It means they saw something in you they want to work with.
Once the an agent has picked up your book, HE is invested in it. Then the agent faces getting rejection as he tries to find a home for it. But then he finds an editor. Then that editor has to go to the acquisitions meeting and HE faces being rejected within that meeting. The editors and agents get invested in your book.Then the marketing and sales guys have to convince the trade they have to buy the book. Then the bookstores have to persuade the public to buy the book. Your rejected experience is the same all the way up the food chain. We understand you. This is why we spend so much time in bars.

10) Send your MS back to everyone who rejected you. Just change a few names, no one will ever notice!
Also totally send your MS that was rejected by one editor in the company to another editor in the same company!

Q&A
Sending a thank you when you get rejected is polite but pointless. We will assume that you’re thankful that we rejected you nicely.

Award wins aren’t bad to mention. If an editor/agent is at all curious about you, they will google you though. If you don’t have a presence online they do find that very strange. And don’t make awards up. We will find it out.

Closing remarks:
Don’t be insane. Oh wait, this is how to be rejected. Be insane.
Professional, patience, politeness, and persistence.
We write because we have a compulsion to write or love it. And it’s wonderful if you get published. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t. Write because you love it.

#

Hands down, this was the most hilarious panel of the weekend. Please realize that a lot of the remarks here are sarcastic advice on how to ensure that your work is going to be rejected, not serious at all.

Other than a lot of laughter, the two things I really got from this panel were:

1) If you’re a nominally socially functional human being who has the necessary attention span to sit down and actually write a damn novel, you are way, way ahead of the game. Way, way, way ahead. I am utterly stunned by the amount of utter crazy most of the editors and agents see.

2) Enough with the aspiring writer thing. If you’re a writer, you write. Period.

That’s actually not the first time I’ve heard #2, not by a long shot. I think the first time I heard it put that baldly was at a Mile Hi Con panel, and that’s what motivated me to really buckle down and write. You’re either a writer or you’re not. And that powerful little boot to the head is what ultimately motivated me to start submitting stories.

…which I think will be a post all its own some day.